Wouldn’t we have a more equitable society if we increased college readiness in K-12 education? The American university, however, suffers from deep issues of equal access for all American students which prevents this equitable society. Students who graduate high school deserving the opportunities of higher education through their hard work should in all cases be able to attend the university of their choice. They are promised college as a reward for hard work, but find the “unsinkable” promise sinking fast.
The problem for American colleges starts with economics. High demand by the wealthy for college and demand for prestigious academic work funded by tuition has raised college costs significantly since the 1980s, as data from the College Board show in Figure 1. Cost increases correspond with a decline in the middle class over the same period. Higher wealth students are beginning to crowd out lower-income students in our universities.
Figure 1: Rising College Costs
Current arguments about college access for low-income students run something like the logic of the Titanic: “well, we can’t save them all, but we might as well save some on the few lifeboats we have.” Isabell Sawhill of the Brookings Institution argued as much in a recent journal article calling for more selective federal aid to students. If costs are so high and increasing college access is expensive, the temptation is to increase the efficiency of college access dollars on the demand side (load the lifeboats with first class passengers) rather than putting lifeboats on the ship for all passengers. Fixing the supply side of high costs (making the ship less sinkable) is an issue for another debate.
The demand side of the college equation — subsidizing college costs to increase demand – seems untenable as costs rise. There simply isn’t enough money available. In New Mexico, lawmakers have had to remove the promise of full tuition coverage on the lottery-funded scholarship as the fund begins to bleed red ink. In Georgia, the lottery-funded HOPE Scholarship covers less and less of state university costs as universities find ways to charge students more out-of-pocket. Additionally, students who benefit from HOPE come mainly from high-income areas.
A second source of subsidized costs after grants are student loans. However, these loans are constantly at risk of spikes in interest rates and therefore endangering financially stretched families. Some colleges are using the subsidies from loans to charge a higher base cost than they would without the loan. As Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa said:
We found that a lot of these for-profit schools were going after the poorest students so they could get the maximum Pell Grants and loans. A lot of the students were not getting a good education; they were dropping out and … defaulting. But the for-profits got to keep the money.
As the student loan bubble grows toward mass default, policy prescriptions increasingly turn to the Titanic approach: Parents of low-income students are now being denied access to higher education loans as loans go more to families which can borrow with less risk of default. Policy for increasing higher education access through grants and loans now loads the lifeboats and takes the people which can be saved, leaving the highest need and most deserving stuck on the sinking ship of unequal access.
There are a few demand-side solutions which offer some hope even as high base costs continue to sink the ship. The Kalamazoo Promise program in Michigan pledges to meet in-state college costs for students who grow up in Kalamazoo Public Schools. It’s better to turn community resources toward subsidizing costs rather than the spiral of increase-aid-increase-tuition at universities and the federal government. Right now, programs such as the Gates Millennium Scholarship are too few and far between. What if our communities and business leaders pledged to sponsor and develop college access for the students who can’t make it into the few lifeboats offered out of high school? Communities which invest in their human resources produce greater equity, as Figure 2 shows from Kalamazoo, MI:
Figure 2: Community-Based College Access
Until we commit to increasing financial access to college, the concept of “college readiness” being sold by policymakers today will ring hollow. We need to find better policies to increase access on the demand side which leave no deserving student out of college, and make enough lifeboats for all students. On the supply side of the size of costs themselves, we need to start a serious debate about why the Titanic of American higher education began to sink in the first place.
